Star-P: High Productivity Parallel Computing

Star-P ‡ is an interactive parallel scientific computing environment. It aims to make parallel programming more accessible. Star-P borrows ideas from Matlab*P [3], but is a new development. Currently only a Matlab interface for Star-P is available, but it is not limited to being a parallel Matlab. It combines all four parallel Matlab approaches in one environment, as described in the parallel Matlab survey [2]: embarrassingly parallel, message passing, backend support and compilation. It also integrates several parallel numerical libraries into one single easy-to-use piece of software. The focus of Star-P is to improve user productivity in parallel programming. We believe that StarP can dramatically reduce the difficulty of programming parallel computers by reducing the time needed for development and debugging. To achieve productivity, it is important that the user interface is intuitive to the user. For example, a large class of scientific users are already familiar with the Matlab language. So it is beneficial to use Matlab as a parallel programming language. Additions to the language are minimal in keeping with the philosophy to avoid re-learning. Also, as a design goal, our system does not distinguish between serial data and parallel data.